Load Balancing Servers: Improving Your Network Performance

What do Load Balancers Do?

A load balancing service is a managed service that re-directs traffic for websites (HTTP-based) or any TCP-based applications between two or more servers with the same content, thus “balancing” the load between servers.

High-traffic websites can serve up to of millions concurrent requests daily. To ensure the high performance of your web site or application, a load balancing service can be used to manage high-volume traffic efficiently and redundantly. The load balancer is placed in front of your servers or network to efficiently distribute incoming network traffic across two or more servers, fulfilling requests at maximum speed. Load balancing services makes sure that no one server in your network is overworked, and prevents performance degradation.

The load balancer regularly checks the health status of the servers inside the group. If one server goes down, it detects this and redirects traffic to the remaining online server(s). When the server goes back up, the load balancer will automatically start sending requests to it again. When a new server is added to the server group and the load balancing policy is configured to include the new server into the group, it will also start to utilize the new server, shifting some load off the existing servers.

Advantages of Load Balancing Service

Ensures high availability and reliability by sending requests only to servers that are online

Provides the flexibility to add or subtract servers as demand dictates

SimplerCloud Load Balancing Servers:

Load Balancing

The main feature of the load balancing service is to balance the traffic load by spreading requests across multiple servers. This will ensure each of the servers to have fair share of the load, avoiding situation where one server’s load is very high while another one is very low. There are different load balancing algorithms which can be used, with round-robin and least-connection to be the two most popular algorithms.

High Availability

The load balancer can also detect if a server goes down and/or unable to serve the requests, and will re-direct the requests to other available servers. Therefore, any downtime to any of the servers will be seamless to your end users.

Reverse Proxy

By proxy-ing traffic on the load balancer end, the load on the origin servers can be reduced, especially for static contents.